[edgy] Live CD improperly detects widescreen monitor.

[Matt Philmon]

I'm uncertain which package to file against... ubiquity? xorg? Live CD?

At any rate (currently using Edgy Knot 2+ - 9/9/2006) I'm running an ATI Radeon X800 All in Wonder with a Dell FPW2005 widescreen LCD monitor. The Live CD boots into 800x600 but is unable to go any higher because it doesn't seem to know what to do with the LCD. The same occurs if I use the installer. I'm only able to get past this problem when I manually modify the xorg.conf file to include some Modeline changes, etc. I don't really understand how that's supposed to work but google always finds an answer for me. Once I get that change in place, I'm able to get my recommended 1680x1050 resolution. However, in the Live CD, I don't really have a way around this so I'm stuck in 800x600. 800x600 is only barely enough screen space to RUN the installer. Unless you set both the top and bottom gnome-panel's to autohide you can't even get to the buttons to click OK or Next or whatever. This means I generally am stuck (on this computer) with using the alternate installer text based, but that still doesn't fix the problem with my monitor.

I know it's certainly possible as Suse 10.1 easily picked up my hardware settings and configured everything perfectly.

[towsonu2003 (towsonu2003)]

thanks for the bug report. I think it's xorg, but I might be wrong. anyway, does this happen with knot3?

[Matt Philmon (mattisking)]

Yes, this has always been the case, including Knot3.

[towsonu2003 (towsonu2003)]

could you attach your xorg.conf files? the one you use and the one liveCD uses? thanks.

ps. workaround for liveCD: change your xorg.conf as you wish then hit ctrl+alt+backspace to restart X.

[Matt Philmon (mattisking)]

Here's the one from Edgy Beta Live CD Desktop Installer. The only available resolution under System-Preferences-Screen Resolution is 800x600.

I'm going to test this install anyway, so I'll run the install, fix xorg.conf to work for me, and then attach it as well.

[Matt Philmon (mattisking)]

Ok - I'm giving up for tonight. My main PC (which hosts the monitor in question) is currently only running Windows because the Edgy Knot 2 CD went so disastrously bad for me on this computer. Knot 3 went great, however (minus this issue) though I opted at the time to wait on Edgy Final before risking this box again which serves lots of purposes including work... hence Windows.

Anyway, after over an hour of playing with modelines from at least 10 different sources I finally gave up and installed fglrx for my ATI X800 card. The 'ati' driver SHOULD work I'd think, but I give up for now. I'm running the Live CD right now at normal resolution for this monitor (1680x1050) but only after setting my Modeline, setting the frequency (60), installing the package xserver-driver-fglrx, running "aticonfig --initial" and restarting gdm. I will try again tomorrow without fglrx. Attached is my working xorg.conf (though with fglrx)

[Andrew Shugg (ashugg)]

It's happening to me with the (release) Ubuntu 6.10 amd64 live CD. =) (Mind you it's been the same for me in Dapper as well.) I'm not stuck in 800x600 though, I get 1280x1024 at 75Hz.

I don't know if I'm prepared to go to the lengths Matt Philmon took to it working. However I have attached my xorg.conf (generated by the Live CD), as it shows that my monitor's preferred resolution of 1680x1050 is listed for all modes. This resolution isn't available via the "Screen Resolution" task in the Preferences menu, though.

Monitor is a ViewSonic vx2025wm, attached to an ATI X1600XT.

I have not yet tried changing from the vesa to fglrx driver, or adding sections to xorg.conf to try a 32-bit colour depth, as this is all still running off the LiveCD at the moment.

Andrew S.

[Andrew Shugg (ashugg)]

While still on the Live CD, I did:

apt-get install xorg-driver-fglrx

(which installed gcc-3.3-base, libc6-i386, libstdc++5 and xorg-driver-fglrx)

I then changed the driver from 'vesa' to 'fglrx' in /etc/X11/xorg.conf and did Ctrl+Alt+Bckspc ... and it worked, I'm in 1680x1050. Only at 60Hz and 24 bit colour but I'm sure I can work on that. =)

So, I suggest that the bug is with xorg-driver-vesa.

Andrew S.

[Bryce Harrington (bryce)]

Also see bug 3731, which is capturing the general bug of ubuntu's bad monitor detection system in general.

It seems that the root cause is that xresprobe is not able to detect a variety of monitors, so we're looking at fixing and/or replacing it.

Starting with feisty, xorg's built in monitor detection system is reputed to be pretty good, so one thing to try is to move xorg.conf to xorg.conf.orig and restart X, as described above.

[pheeror (pheeror)]

Problem is still there. When I boot kubuntu 7.10 tribe 5 livecd, it creates(?) wrong modes in xorg.conf file. I have to change _1440x1440_ to 1440x900 in xorg.conf to get it working properly. Tested on GeForce4 MX 440, 10de:0181

[Bryce Harrington (bryce)]

Aha, the 1440x1440 bug! Filing as dupe of 115220